Mahler’s “Das klagende Lied”: Grisly and Derivative, But At Least Not Sentimental

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve spent this morning and early afternoon listening to an oddball work by Gustav Mahler, Das klagende Lied, whose first draft was composed in 1880-81 (while Richard Wagner, whose footprints are all over this score, was still alive – I’ve never been a fan of Mahler and have often joked that if Wagner had lived long enough to hear Mahler’s music he would have regarded him as confirmation of everything nasty Wagner ever had to say about Jewish composers) but which wasn’t premiered until 1901 in a version that simply removed “Waldmarchen,” the first part of the story. The overall title means “Song of Lamentation” (by interesting coincidence the first work of another prominent Jewish composer-conductor, Leonard Bernstein, for singer and orchestra was called “Lamentation,” and was later incorporated as the last movement of Bernstein’s first symphony, “Jeremiah”) and the work is based on two German fairy tales, one under the work’s title by Ludwig Bechstein and one called “The Singing Bone” by the Brothers Grimm. The work was originally conceived for 11 vocal soloists, a full-sized mixed choir and an enormous orchestra, though when Mahler revised it for the premiere in 1901 he cut down the numbers to make it a bit more practical. He also lopped off the first of the cantata’s three movements, in which he told the backstory: a queen sets up a contest for her would-be suitors . It’s a sort of scavenger hunt in the forest in which the contestants are supposed to look for a particular red rose, and the first one who finds it and brings it back to her can marry her. (At least she didn’t order the losers put to death à la Turandot.) Two brothers, one good and one evil, set off in search of the rose; the good brother finds it but then puts it in his cap and falls asleep. The evil brother comes upon him, steals the rose and kills him. In the second part, a minstrel comes upon the bones of the dead good brother and makes a flute out of one of them, which when played tells the whole story. The third and final part takes place on the day of the queen’s scheduled wedding to the evil brother, when the minstrel shows up at court bearing the flute. The evil brother takes it from him and plays it himself, whereupon the good brother’s voice, preserved by the flute, accuses him of murder. The queen faints, the wedding guests flee, and at the end the queen’s entire castle collapses.

Like Arnold Schönberg’s Gurrelieder, Das klagende Lied is a massive work (though even the restored three-movement version, discovered in 1969, lasts only 67 minutes) but it’s also unstaged, probably because attempting to do it as an opera would have challenged the budget of even the largest theatres – like the Vienna Court Opera (later the Vienna State Opera after Austria ceased to be a monarchy following World War I), where Mahler worked as a conductor. It’s a reasonably entertaining work given the grimness (no pun intended) of the subject matter – a pretty typical slice of German Romanticism – and it doesn’t put me off as a lot of Mahler’s scores do, at least partly because he doesn’t throw in any tawdry Austrian folk songs and undercut his symphonic structures with utterly banal music. (Charles Ives did that, too, but I suspect because I’m an American I know a lot of the tunes Ives was quoting – if he stuck “Yankee Doodle” into the middle of a symphony I can “read” it and say, “Oh, that’s ‘Yankee Doodle.’ Let’s wait and find out what he did with it” – and maybe if I were Austrian I’d recognize Mahler’s quotes and wonder why Ives stuck that silly little march melody into his work.) The Wikipedia page on Das klagende Lied claims that Mahler started work on it in 1876 (also the year the complete Wagner Ring des Nibelungen had its world premiere at Bayreuth) when he was still a student at the Vienna Conservatory, and it’s filled with Wagnerisms (it’s the sort of piece that leads me to start humming the Wagner themes it reminds me of) and also intimations of Richard Strauss and even a few bits that sound like the young Debussy (whose music hadn’t reached beyond France when Das klagende Lied was composed). That was the German Zeitgeist at the time (yes, I know Mahler was Austrian, but the musical worlds of Germany and Austria were joined at the hip and composers frequently migrated back and forth), and it fits comfortably into the High Romantic style that dominated German music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries until Arnold Schönberg abandoned his own High Romantic style of Wagner knock-offs (Verklärte Nacht, Jakobsleiter, Gurrelieder) and created 12-tone composition. (And a large part of High Romanticism survived in Germany when the Nazis took over because they decided 12-tone composition and the less drastic but still far-reaching innovations of non-Germans like Stravinsky and Debussy were “anti-German” and examples of “degenerate” music.)

The version of Das klagende Lied I was listening to was one of the CD’s you get free for subscribing to BBC Music Magazine, and it was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Donald Runnicles. It’s unclear just what the provenance of this score is – it’s the three-movement version but most three-movement recordings follow the rediscovered first movement as Mahler left it in 1888 (when he decided to delete it from the score) and the revised versions of the second and third that Mahler premiered in 1901 – though some Mahler scholars regard this as an unjustified and unsuccessful mashup of music from two quite different parts of Mahler’s career. I dug this out of my CD collection for re-examination because the latest issue of BBC Music Magazine also came with a CD of music by Mahler – his First Symphony (“The Titan”), which by the way is another early work from which Mahler removed an entire movement (a sort of concerto for trumpet and strings called “Blumine,” which means “flowery”) before finalizing the score, and another work in which later conductors, following the rediscovery of “Blumine,” simply plugged it into place along with the rest of the symphony as Mahler revised it following his deletion of “Blumine.” This came from a 2019 concert in Edinburgh by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Dausgard, prefaced by a rather direction-less 12-minute medley of Jewish folk tunes called Klez’ Mahler played by a large klezmer ensemble called She’ Koyosh. The point appears to have been to show how at least some of Mahler’s insertions are of traditional Jewish folk melodies, which may be true but doesn’t make the symphony any easier to take. I once described Mahler as “the Barry Manilow of classical music” because he always seemed to feel so sorry for himself – yes, I understand that as a Jew in notoriously anti-Semitic late-19th-century Vienna he had a lot to feel sorry about (just as Tchaikovsky, another late 19th-century composer whose work has a lot of sentimentality, had because he was Gay), but still … I remember once hearing a record of Mahler’s song cycle Kindertotenlieder, which means “Songs about Dead Children,” and it was as rankly and blood-curdlingly sentimental as one would expect from a song cycle by Mahler about dead children. Not even the singer – the great Wagner soprano Kirsten Flagstad – could make it palatable for me. This may explain why I like Das klagende Lied better than a lot of Mahler’s later music: it may be derivative as all get-out (though Wagner was the 900-pound elephant in the room of German music just then and it was hard to escape his influence), anbd the story has a fashionable grisliness German audiences of the time loved, but at least it's not sentimental!